Abstract
What are the kinds of resonances that chime with the various clichés and tropes used to represent alternative comedy today? Certainly, there are those critics who seem to take joy in mercilessly writing and rewriting the obituaries of supposedly outmoded forms of resistance. This chapter argues that this resignation is sustained through a particular kind of relationship with alternative comedy, one based on a ‘politics of antagonism’. It explores resignation alongside a reading of Harry Enfield’s Loadsamoney. It asks: does this unsubtle satire of early 1980s working-class treachery lose its political bite as it becomes more mainstream, more adored by those from all sides of the political spectrum? It also examines how affirmative answers to this question pre-empt a certain kind of defeatism.
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Notes
- 1.
As well as in the artform of stand-up in general.
- 2.
Loadsamoney was a character created by comedians Harry Enfield, Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson. Enfield played this brash, arrogant, swagger-fuelled plasterer—so boastful of his heavy wage packets and so mocking of the poor—only around half a dozen times from the mid-to-late-1980s. Even so, this rather unsubtle satire of working-class treachery gained such a widespread and diverse collective public response that it is often invoked now as one of the defining commentaries on British 1980s political and economic culture.
- 3.
Ben Elton = a first-generation alternative comic. Known for his explicit political diatribes on the state of Thatcherite Britain and, depending on perspective, for either being instrumental in giving Alternative Comedy the television presence and public attention it so obviously deserved, or for being the shameless sell-out that used Alternative Comedy’s motifs to catapult his own television career.
- 4.
Alexei Sayle = a first-generation alternative comic and the Comedy Store’s first compere. Known for a comedy which juxtaposes a style and character that’s anarchic, volatile and working class with high concept surrealist material, like being mistaken for the German playwright Bertolt Brecht—who’s not dead, but just ‘had a fortnight off’ (Double 2020, p. 93).
- 5.
Keith Allen = a first-generation alternative comic. After being a regular at the Comedy Store, he had a few television appearances on The Comic Strip Presents … (Channel 4 1983–1988) and The Young Ones (BBC Two 1982–1984) before becoming disillusioned enough to break away from the scene completely. He told John Connor in 1989 that ‘for me, it was all over after six months—it was very much like punk’ (Connor 1989, p. 16).
- 6.
Pauline Melville = a first-generation alternative comic and founding member of the Alternative Cabaret. Known for her character comedy portraying the lived experience of working-class people, as well as poking fun at some of the logical fallacies of Leftist dogma. Her character Edie, for example, was always misremembering elements of leftist culture or failing to act as radical as she aspired to be (Double 2020).
- 7.
Rik Mayall = a second-generation alternative comic and one of the founding members of The Comic Strip. Along with his comedy partner Ade Edmondson, Mayall pioneered a style of comedy, not based on searing political commentary, but on strange parodies, grotesque caricatures and on incongruously synthesising a cartoonish joke world with real world logic. It is a comedy that privileges playing with form over generating new perspectives (content) and one that has led to Mayall becoming the most recognised and loved comedians of his generation.
- 8.
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi = political theorist and activist long associated with the Italian operaismo (workerist) movement.
- 9.
Mark Fisher = British cultural theorist. Known for his 2009 book Capitalist Realism and, under the alias K-Punk, for his prolific contributions to the blogosphere.
- 10.
Jim Morrison = co-founder and lead vocalist of the 1960s psychedelic rock band, The Doors. Born out of the 1960s counter-culture movements, the band’s raw and experimental style, Morrison’s anarchic anti-establishment philosophy and lifestyle, erratic behaviour both on and off stage, his poetic lyric choices with explicit influences from Nietzsche, Blake, Baudelaire and other surrealist and libertine thinkers—all capturing the sound and sentiment of the era—and his death at twenty-seven under mysterious circumstances, led to Morrison becoming one of the most widely celebrated rebellious figures of the twentieth century. There are even some messianic qualities to the ways in which he is often remembered. Well, he certainly had the hair for it.
- 11.
The American jazz composer Miles Davis recorded and released his 1972 studio album, On the Corner, as one of his many attempts to shake up jazz—to push it away from the dreary ossified repetitions of samey jazz, of Established Jazz already captured by the mainstream and the white man, and towards a newly relevant experimental fusion of rock, funk, R&B, electronic guitars and synthesisers—a music on par with the progressive force of the rock n roll of the time. It was widely considered an abject failure upon release, but has since reclaimed a great reverence and critical standing.
- 12.
Perhaps our jaded interlocutors might even cite the opening of the Comic Strip as the moment when Alternative Comedy really got going, and then plummeted and crashed into commercialism. After all, the crowds, as Alexei Sayle recalls, were at least initially, ‘a load of counterculture people’ (Double 2020, p. 49).
- 13.
This soulful, melancholic, but defiant, song by Sam Cooke—full of French horns and the personal experiences of Cooke as a black man in segregated America—contains the much-loved chorus refrain and lyrical crescendo—‘It’s been a long time coming, but I know a change gon’ come’.
- 14.
Stewart Lee = a 1990s alternative comic. Known for his 1990s collaboration with comedy partner Richard Herring—Fists of Fun (BBC Two 1995–1996), This Morning With Richard Not Judy (BBC Two 1998–1999)—and for his 2004 re-emergence into comedy as a solo act. His comic persona has explicitly taken on the cultural mantle of Alternative Comedy, as well as, obviously, many of its troupes—seemingly spontaneous mid-routine deconstruction of his own jokes, high concept material, deadpan delivery and so on.
- 15.
Tony Allen = a first-generation alternative comic and founding member of the Alternative Cabaret. Often affectionately thought of as ‘a kind of spiritual leader of the scene’, Allen can be found (even to this day) ‘promoting radical, anarchist ideas about what [Alternative Comedy] should and shouldn’t be’ (Double 2020, p. 11).
- 16.
Jim Barclay = a first-generation alternative comic and founding member of the Alternative Cabaret.
- 17.
Andy De La Tour = a first-generation alternative comic and founding member of the Alternative Cabaret.
- 18.
Frankfurt School = a group of European intellectuals, activists and political dissidents who, during the interwar period (1918–1939), disparately drew together insights from Marxist, Freudian and Hegelian thought to engender new ways of thinking about the political, social, economic concerns of the twentieth century. Although originally founded at Goethe University Frankfurt, the increasing threat of violence and intellectual suppression from the Nazis led them to move the School to Geneva and then eventually to New York.
- 19.
Saturday Live (or, in its third series, Friday Night Live) (Channel 4 1985–1988) was Britain’s short-lived answer to America’s Saturday Night Live (NBC 1975–present)—a variety show with stand-up routines, skits and music. For many in the Alternative Comedy scene of the time, this show was the first opportunity to showcase their work on a national stage.
- 20.
I shall admit, for the record, that Elton did actually return to comedy for tour in 2019.
- 21.
This is taken from William Cook’s 2001 book, The Comedy Store, but it is actually a reference to a quote from a Guardian article featuring Rob Newman in 2000.
- 22.
And, again, of all the divergent narratives and overly situated declarations around Alternative Comedy, this is another which proves that accounts of a movement once measured by its authenticity—and its subsequent loss—seems to shift temporalities according to whoever we happen to be engaging with.
- 23.
Simon Munnery = a 1990s alternative comic. Known for a comedy full of political satire and surrealism, and for routines built around strange connections to elaborate props. His character, The League Against Tedium for instance, often entered the stage donning a hat made from a kettle, epaulettes that were home to working model tanks and shoes covered in roses.
- 24.
David Baddiel and Rob Newman became comedy partners for a period in the early 1990s and—along with another comedy duo, Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis—co-wrote/co-stared in The Mary Whitehouse Experience (BBC Two 1990–1992). This loud, colourful, rapid-fire show featured a mix of observational comedy and ‘edgy’ satirical jabs at popular culture. It was very popular at the time.
- 25.
And, as Double correctly remarks, the glitzy set pieces, the ‘zigzagging follow-spots and the blaring indie music that accompanied [Baddiel and Newman] onto the stage are a million miles from the sweaty intimacy of an alternative comedy gig’ (Double 1997, p. 227).
- 26.
Richard Herring = a 1990s alternative comic. Known for his 1990s comedy partnership with Stewart Lee, but, more recently, for becoming a pioneer in both the single-concept driven solo show and the emergence of comedy podcasts. Since 2001, Herring has written and performed over sixteen solo shows—the narrative force of which both gravitates towards and deviates from a singular concept, rather than a disparately held together series of interlocking jokes or broadly themed talking points. His 2002 show Talking Cock, for instance, was a sensitive and critically self-reflexive celebration of the history of humanity’s relationship with the penis, and, in 2009, he grew a toothbrush moustache for a show he called Hitler Moustache, in which he attempted to reclaim the style on behalf of Charlie Chaplin. Herring’s comedy podcast Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre Podcast (or, as the cool kids are calling it, RHLSTP!) features interviews with notable guests—mostly fellow comedians—has been running for nineteen series and has gained a lot of critical attention.
- 27.
This is a butchering of a line from this performance that I have rephrased in order to make it better flow as a sentence. The actual line is ‘you all live in a reflecting hall of digital mirrors made of Facebooks and Twitters and Snapchats and Instagrams and Deliveroos and selfies and WhatsApps. You’re the kind of people who were run over by a bus because you were crossing the road while looking at a bus-timetable app’ (Lee 2019, p. 380).
- 28.
Left-Wing Melancholy is a concept—a feeling, a mourning—that criss-crosses so much of the breadth of the rhetoric of Leftist figures—from Rosa Luxemburg, Auguste Blanqui and Walter Benjamin to Wendy Brown and, more recently, Enzo Traverso. It speaks to a spectral memory so deeply embedded in revolutionary imaginaries—a memory of defeatism. A memory not only of the defeats of the past—the suppression of the 1848 June Days uprising or the 1873 Paris Commune, the dissipation of May 1968—but also a kind of prefigured memory of future defeats. It is a memory that collapses into a tendency to abstract from the contingency of failure principles and judgements that overdetermine the reasons and circumstances of these past defeats and then obsesses over these abstractions so much that the obsession becomes an end in itself—so much that a weary resignation and a manic idealism takes the place the pragmatic politics needed to intervene in the present.
- 29.
This entire 1981 Dangerous Brothers set plays out in typical anarchic fashion as Mayall and Edmondson repeatedly stumble over each other in their own manic neediness to be the one that successfully follows the ‘rules of joke telling’. In desperation they decide to tell ‘The Gooseberry Joke’ = ‘What’s green and hairy and goes up and down? … A gooseberry in a lift’, but proceed to pick apart the logical inconsistencies of such a statement—‘How does a gooseberry get into a lift? … Somebody brings it in. … How is it going to press the buttons?’. In this anguished attempt to ‘tell the joke correctly’, they both deconstruct the statement, adding more and more caveats, until the joke absurdly becomes—‘What is it, when there’s a man and a lady, who don’t wanna have a baby, but they wanna do the bits upstairs, they wanna play babies. So, they’ve got a rubber gooseberry bush, which is trembling with fright, because they’re trembling with fright, shaking the gooseberry bush, which shakes a gooseberry off, hits one of the buttons and the lift goes up and down? What’s that? … A Gooseberry!’ (Edmondson and Mayall 2008).
- 30.
Double deconstructs this joke in more detail by suggesting that the premise of the joke is ‘not the joke itself, but the pair’s failure to tell it properly’—that the laughter comes from the act’s ‘characterisation as maniac’s in purple suits’ and the ‘ridiculing [of] a more traditional style of entertainer’ (Double 2020, p. 104).
- 31.
This is not to suggest that Mayall and Edmondson were the only comics that played with form. The experimentative reinvention of both content and form has been a consistent quality of the Alternative Comedy since its early stages—and this, of course, includes the members of the Alternative Cabaret. If playing with form is a less dominant narrative when recollecting Alternative Comedy, then it is only because it is another aspect of the movement that a politics of antagonism does not necessarily appreciate.
- 32.
Al Murray = a 1990s alternative comic. Murray’s character, The Pub Landlord, began as a well-crafted satire of the ‘soft right’—caricaturing their casual xenophobia and sexism, their patriotic reverence for ‘traditional British values’—to ‘packed Fringe festival attics of adoring liberals’ (Lee 2010, p. 293). We see another example here of an apparent tension between resistance and recuperation as the character became more popular and broke into mainstream cultural attention around the mid-noughties. Lefty liberals might continue to praise The Pub Landlord for the obvious satirical nature of the character’s persona, but now the hordes of racist, women-hating Righties also have a comedian they can take at face value to legitimise their prejudices. Murray’s response? To continually shake up audience’s expectations and to take the character on unexpected pursuits and pathways. The most interesting of which was the character’s 2015 parliamentary candidacy election for South Thanet (running against then UKIP leader, Nigel Farage). How interesting to place the character in a situation where it didn’t matter which side of the political spectrum supported his winning of the seat—as long as he got the votes.
- 33.
Johnny Vegas = a 1990s alternative comic. Born Michael Pennington, Vegas adopted his comic persona in the early 1990s and, as Lee suggests, plays this character so convincingly that, ‘when it encounters an increasingly superficial media, Johnny’s behaviour is portrayed as synonymous with Michael Pennington’ (Lee 2010, p. 331). Vegas’s talent for raging at the audience, for ‘drunkenly’ stumbling around the stage swearing, fretting and embarking of lengthy surreal monologues that lead nowhere has made him one of the most recognised and loved comedians in recent years. It is a recognition, however, which fails to see that Vegas is not just a hopeless drunk perpetually at the brink of a mental breakdown, but that this is a carefully drawn together act meant to ‘embody blackly hilarious notions of desperation, loneliness and bewilderment’ (Lee 2010, p. 331). A similar tension to that of The Pub Landlord is perhaps found here, but it is one that Vegas attempts to resolve (or, at least, play with) by leaning into this misunderstanding as much as possible—‘standing alongside soap opera celebs in TV listings magazines Johnny, like the skeleton at the feast, renders them all ridiculous, whilst he remains idiotically removed, so low in status that he cannot be harmed, a genius fool’ (Lee 2010, p. 333).
- 34.
Harry Hill = a 1990s alternative comic. Although now perhaps most favourably recognised for his much-acclaimed weekly television satire show Harry Hill’s TV Burp (ITV 2001–2012), Hill could also be found in the 1990s trying to convince BBC execs the ‘comic possibilities of flies’ by ‘filling miniature television studios, sealed inside Perspex tanks, with hundreds of them’ and readying them all for fly related skit segments (Lee 2010, p. 231).
- 35.
Tom Mayhew = a contemporary alternative comic. A self-professed working-class comic, Mayhew rose to critical attention as recently as 2019 with his Edinburgh Fringe show, I, Tom Mayhew. A show which unpacked his own experiences of being long-term unemployed in their 20s in austerity Britain.
- 36.
Chris Coltrane = a contemporary alternative comic. Although Coltrane hung up his comedy mic for good in 2017, he actually spent an entire decade providing nuanced and poignant political commentary, as well as satirising the British political climate around him—long enough for him to become a well-known and respected name amongst the circuit and the comedy nerds. His comedy was explicitly and proudly leftist, with shows like 2015 Left-Wing Propaganda Machine and 2016 Socialist Fun Times. More interesting perhaps, however, was his attempts to carve out alternative spaces in which comedians might safely experiment more freely with lefty material. Sophie Quirk places Coltrane’s Camden club, Lolitics, as part of a larger movement in the contemporary circuit to create friendlier and more diverse spaces which offset a pervasive celebration of the more ‘old school’ 1980s ‘gonging, heckley … gladiatorial’ atmospheres (Quirk 2018, p. 86). From combative to supportive spaces—here we see another example of Alternative Comedy reinventing itself.
- 37.
Josie Long = a contemporary alternative comic. Long has been gigging since she was fourteen and has long been widely considered, not simply a greatly respected and loved alternative comic, but one instrumental in birthing and shaping the new British alternative scene that exists today. Her comedy derives from an eclectic mix of political commentary, personal experience and a high energy/low maintenance DIY ethos. It is this DIY ethos in particular that makes her such a versatile comic—this stream of consciousness conversational comedy that creates an atmosphere which feels joyous, intimate and anarchic regardless of the size and ‘seriousness’ of her selected stage. It is also this DIY ethos that drives her activism both inside and outside of comedy—her fanzines, her performing in protest of various tory penchants and policies (tax avoidance, funding cuts, austerity etc.), and her own attempts to create safe alternative spaces for experimental comedy. See Quirk (2017) for a discussion on Long’s club, Lost Treasures of the Black Heart.
- 38.
John-Luke Roberts = a contemporary alternative comic. Roberts—a champion of the absurd, the obscure and the silly—favours a comedy style that implements prop gags, character comedy and surreal slapstick physicality. But to call Roberts any one of these styles (or any two or three) would perhaps do him a disservice. It is not only that his shows obviously contain a combination of the three, but also (and perhaps more so) that no combination of them really captures the erudite multitudes which Roberts embodies. The genius of Roberts is in the marrying of absurdity and silliness with a deeply intricate cerebral architecture—one that holds the shows together while also allowing for a rich improvised flexibility in the way that these shows play out.
- 39.
Ben Target = a contemporary alternative comic. Although to call Target simply a comic would perhaps be slightly misleading. He describes himself as an ‘artist who works in comedy’ or an ‘independent artist’ that ‘curates comedy experiences that are multi-sensory’ (Goldsmith 2018). Target is another absurdist who uses props and storytelling to create intricate imaginary narrative-scapes from which a whole multitude of emotion and theme might exude. His shows, much like Roberts, invoke this sense that anything could happen, and it is perhaps this anything could happen that is important for Target’s reticence to be label fully and simply as a comic. We could reductively say that what Target does is more than comedy, or we could see this as yet another example of how comedy seems to reinvent itself to the extent that it exceeds its own established forms and parameters.
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Brady, J. (2022). The Dramatic Script of Alternative Comedy. In: Double, O., Lockyer, S. (eds) Alternative Comedy Now and Then. Palgrave Studies in Comedy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97351-3_9
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